SO MANY DUMB WAYS…

This last weekend I taught at a junior high winter camp for Forest Home and got to take Jake along for the ride. It was super fun and if nothing else, a great father/son win for me. Jake and I had a GREAT time.

Anyway, on saturday night, we were talking about living with Love as our guide and not money or relationships or anything else the world sorta taunts us with as a good reason to live. So to illustrate my point, I decided to come at it from a slightly different angle and show this overplayed and still funny video of some silly ways to die. (No joke, I bet 75% of the audience sang the lyrics as it played too btw).

Anyway… as tragic as it might be to die dumb, at least it’s over after your stupidity shows itself. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thankful for a God of grace, but there are plenty of times when I think just going to heaven would be better than living in the mess I’ve made. I mean, it’d be horrible to end a great life doing something dumb like pressing that red button (ha ha.. that one’s my favorite). But there’s something far worse than dying dumb and winning the infamous “darwin award“.

Dying dumb is one thing.

Living dumb is an entirely different -and altogether worse thing I think.

Really… ponder that. I’m sure that some people will die in tragic and maybe even dumb ways in 2014. Maybe you will. Maybe I will. But even knowing that is true, it is also true that none of us will sign up for that willingly. On the flip side though, there is a much LARGER percentage of people who will keep on living, but in ways that are just plain stupid. In other words, more of us will live dumb in 2014 than die dumb. I wonder what percentage of the population will get to the end of the year and say, “Wow, what a waste.”

I don’t want that to be me.

My hard drive crashed last Wednesday and I’ve spent the last 5 days either dealing with my broken computer or trying to fully get the back up disk to get everything truly back up and running. Not my plan for 2014. So far, I’ve spent a day puking, a day sleeping it off, and 2 full days fixing my computers in the last 3 weeks. I want those days back, but they’re gone. So all I can do at this point is use them as reminders of what I don’t want to LIVE my life doing.

I really don’t want to waste my life trusting in stuff that won’t last, investing my time and resources into pointless ventures, or choosing to accept the status quo in my life, family, and job. I don’t want to die dumb. But worse yet, I don’t want to live that way either. I don’t want to live for approval of people and miss the peace of God. I don’t want to live to get rich and miss the joy in giving. I don’t want to live for success and miss the experiences of the journey to it.

In fact, it was Jesus who called us to a better way to live that would be an abundant life (John 10:10) instead of one stolen and void of purpose. In the same way however, he also called us to die. He called us to die to some dumb stuff (Mark 8:34-38) in order that we might live for the real stuff of eternal Kingdom living.

So, I guess the bottom line is… if dying dumb is bad, living dumb is a tragedy. Don’t fear death, fear a pointless life.